When I received the new AXE Hold + Touch hair styling products, I was skeptical. Too many times in the past I had fallen prey to styling products that you could squeeze out of a tube that simply didn’t work.

More often than not, these products had the consistency and holding power of Dep or LA Looks (for all you children of the 80s and 90s), and no matter how many layers you glopped on, the product wouldn’t hold — it would merely coat your hair, mat it down and make it look sweaty, like Colin Farrell’s portrayal of Don Johnson in Miami Vice. Or, Don Cheadle in any movie he has ever been in. And guess what guys? Chicks hate the sweaty, Vaseline hair look.

Anyway, it was impossible to style or spike your hair, or give it the appearance of body or texture with those aforementioned products. And generally, those products came in squeezable tubes — just like the AXE samples that were staring up at me from a recently opened UPS delivery parcel. “Yawn,” I thought.

After a Sunday morning workout in preparation of doing nothing but watching NFL football and drinking all day, I took a shower and decided to try the AXE Hold + Touch Paste for Fine Hair first of the three samples.

My hair is somewhere between thick and fine so I chose the Paste for Fine Hair first because, generally, pastes are pretty strong. But based on the texture of the Fine Hair product, I squeezed an excessive amount into my hands, rubbed them together and began to style my hair. As I applied it, I looked in the mirror and thought, “Yawn, how predictable; another inferior hair gel.”